Nordic Cool 2013 Forum Talk by Bjarke Ingels

As part of the Nordic Cool 2013 Forum: Designing Nature: Art & Architecture in Cities and Public Spaces exhibition, which is on now until March 17, Bjarke Ingels, the internationally acclaimed Danish architect and founder and principal of BIG, will give a forum talk on February 24. At this free event, located at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C, Ingels will share to the audience his views on development and challenges of sustainable design. Through a series of award-winning design projects, Bjarke and BIG have developed a reputation for designing buildings that are as programmatically and technically innovative as they are cost and resource conscious. More information after the break.

An advocate for hedonsitic sustainability, Ingels studied at Technical University of Barcelona’s School of Architecture and graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen in 1999. After working for OMA in Rotterdam, Bjarke returned to Copenhagen where he co-founded PLOT Architects in 2001. In 2005, Bjarke founded BIG, which has grown to 130 people with offices in Copenhagen and New York City. Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen.

Like a form of programmatic alchemy, Bjarke and BIG create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working and shopping to realize symbiotic synergies in the form of new, reproducible urban typologies. Additionally Bjarke advocates the idea of “hedonistic sustainability,” which presents sustainability as a design challenge rather than a moral dilemma.